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Tuesday, May 7, 2013

the beauty of simplicity.

Aldo Leopold: "Experience... is
actually a progressive dilution of the essentials by the trivialities
of living."

Life is more beautiful when reduced to
the essentials. It seems at times like we are surrounded by
superfluousness since birth, at least here in America. The
accumulation begins when we're still in the womb, at a baby shower –
so many things in so many boxes, and really, is the convenience of a
new gadget offset by the inconvenience of organizing a
house full of stuff?

Some stuff is unnecessary but beautiful
– pottery, I think, and books and glass and art – and therefore
necessary for its beauty. We need beauty. But so much of what fills
our lives is just throwaway clutter. We think of ourselves as
consumers, but really, it's our habits that consume us. There are
people I love dearly who are convinced of the necessity of changing
one's curtains twice a year, ironing the doilies, and keeping the
exterior of their cars impeccably clean. They become stressed when
they lack the time for these perceived necessities.

These, of course, are not
earth-shattering observations. In an increasingly complex world, we
are urged at every turn to simplify. But instead of actually doing
it, we buy a magazine about simplifying our lives and add it to the
stack of Things To Read, after which it's relegated to Things To
Organize and Dust, and later, Things To Recycle. Rarely does anyone
truly downsize: when we decide to get rid of something, we eventually
buy something else to take its place.

Spartanism is an ugly alternative,
though, and I certainly don't want it. There are few things I love
more than going to a flea market and spending a morning pawing
through other people's junk, marveling at the discarded bits of life
that are sold and sold again, cycled through generations and across
borders. I walked away from one last weekend with a cast iron pan –
something I hope will last a lifetime, but I don't delude myself.
Tastes change. Even while espousing against it, I add more clutter to
my life with great enthusiasm.

And yet caught in the cycle, I pause.
Past a certain point, more stuff unequivocally equals less time. Today I scoffed at
my mother when she said she'd be happy living in a one-room cabin,
but my grandmother – who is one of the people convinced she needs
to do housework that I find completely unnecessary – defended the
statement, reminiscing about the times she lived on the road for
months in a small RV after she and my grandfather retired. She loved
the simplicity of having everything its place in her tiny home on
wheels; it was like being on a ship, where everything has a function
and nothing is extraneous.

I've experienced this myself:
traveling, to an extent, is an exercise in simplicity, living off
only what you can carry on your person. I did it for years. But the
truest example of this kind of beauty has come from my time with
Alaska Crossings, when, for seven weeks at a stretch you live fully
in the present day. Every morning you wake up and think only about
the essential needs of the group: getting from point A to point B
safely, finding water, gathering wood and making a fire, cooking
food, setting up shelter, and sleeping. You move no faster than your
own arms or legs can carry you. You live by the weather and the
tides. You find water from the earth, and sleep under the trees.
There are no bills to pay, no errands to run; no distractions from
the important work of building relationships and living unobtrusively
in the wilderness -- and somehow, the outside world carries on without
you and you find you can still be happy.

In nature, as on a tidy ship, there is
nothing without purpose. It's only during these times living in the
bush that I've come to understand what's truly important and what can
fall away as easily as a leaf from a tree, and even as I pack my car full of stuff to take with me to Colorado, I'm grateful to have
had the opportunity.

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About Me

I'm Krista. I write stories about the intersection of people, places and nature. Formally, I'm a contributor at High Country News, a non-profit environmental news magazine once called "a scrappy institution that produces some of the finest journalism in the American West." My work has also been published in Slate, Orion, Alaska magazine, New Zealand Wilderness magazine, the Denver Post, Adventure Journal, and a number of other newspapers and websites. See more at www.kristaleelanglois.com.